Tuesday, 16 June 2009

Revenue / Browser

Here's some interesting stats from Mibbit... I checked out the average revenue generated per 1,000 visits on the main site. The data covered about 800k visits, so reasonably statistically valid I think.

First off, here's the visit breakdown:

Firefox: 58.75%

IE: 26.11%

Chrome: 6.46%

Opera: 3.95%

Safari: 3.63%

Mozilla: 0.67%

Now here's the average revenue generated per 1,000 visits for each browser. Calculated for example as Safari_revenue * 1000 / Safari_visits:

Safari: $2.392

Firefox: $1.599

Mozilla: $1.476

Chrome: $1.053

IE: $1.050

Opera: $0.388

This sort of went against some of my assumptions. I imagined that IE would be the top revenue generator, as you sort of imagine IE users as being less tech savvy, more 'used to' clicking on adverts etc.

The other interesting point to note is that you should never believe the extremely vocal minority who tell you that all firefox users have AdBlockPlus installed. They don't. As you can see Firefox users are the 2nd best revenue generators.

I didn't know where to place safari before I did the calculations, but it does make some sense. Apple users are more used to spending money, (They likely value their time more than their money), so perhaps this is why they generate more revenue.

The shocker was Opera. An Opera user generates just 16% of an average Safari user! That's really poor. Someone mentioned something about built in content blocking in Opera, but I couldn't find it in a default install.

So should I start pushing people away from Opera, and toward firefox+safari? Well, no, they're probably more likely using the browser *because* of their advertising behavior, not the other way around.... Still, food for thought.

So what about OSes?

Macintosh: $2.156

Linux: $2.076

Windows: $1.285

So once again, we have Mac users ready to spend money, click on ads, etc. The surprise is that Linux users generate quite a bit more revenue than Windows users. Counter to what I had assumed previously.

Note that these stats exclude iphone/ipod/opera mobile which aren't really big enough to draw many conclusions from - also people don't click often on ads on mobiles.

The stats were generated using Google analytics tied to adsense, which works really well for things like this.

In summary then:

Apple users are good at generating revenue - they buy stuff

Linux and firefox users are also good - don't listen to the overly vocal AdBlockPlus user that likes to tell you how everyone using firefox doesn't see any ads anyway

IE/windows is solid enough

Opera is terrible

Google analytics rocks

If you have any thoughts on why Opera should be so bad, please post a comment, perhaps it's to do with the 'turbo mode'? afaik this puts everything through their opera-mini web proxies? so perhaps that blocks ads?

Update:

As mentioned by some commenters, this may have more to do with different locations than browsers, coupled to the fact that some browsers have definite geographical biases. For example, Opera usage in these stats for the US, is 2%, whilst Opera usage for eastern Europe is 8%. In short, Opera may have a geographical bias toward less-easily-monetized countries (At least using adsense).

8 comments:

I just realized that probably average Opera user is more tech-savvy / geeky than the average user of any other browser (Firefox has become mainstream and Safari comes with OS X). And computer geeks don't love ads that much, I guess.

you only found a correlation (safari users tend to correlate with more ad clicking) it is not a causality link (you don't get the ex-Opera users to click on ads if you force them to use Safari). So the only relevant data in your data set is what ads Safari users click more and you should be showing more of those when you see a Safari user. Also macs are more expensive (the apple Tax) so it would seem logical that they are more likely to do purchases quickly.

You need to get away from AdSense. I would stop trying to get higher returns from AdSense, and start experimenting with other kinds of ads, that you choose with your brain (which is very likely to understand your audience better than Google).